The shadows of evening met Van, as he stepped from the outside door and started up the street. Then a figure emerged from the shadows and met him by the corner.
It was Queenie. Her eyes were red from weeping. A smile that someway affected Van most poignantly, he knew not why, came for a moment to her lips.
"You didn't expect to see me here," she said. "I had to come to see if it was so."
"What is it, Queenie? What do you mean? What do you want?" he answered. "What's the trouble?"
"Nothing," she said. "I don't want nothing I can git—I guess—unless—Oh,isit her, Van? Is it sure all over with me?"
"Look here," he said, not unkindly, "you've always been mistaken, Queenie. I told you at the time—that time in Arizona—I'd have done what I did for an Indian squaw—for any woman in the world. Why couldn't you let it go at that?"
"You know why I couldn't," she answered with a certain intensity of utterance that gave him a species of chill. "After what you done—like the only real friend I ever had—I belonged to you—and couldn't even take myself away."
"But I didn't want anyone to belong to me, Queenie. You know that. I could barely support my clothes."
Her eyes burned with a strange luminosity. Her utterance was eager.
"But you want somebody to belong to you now? Ain't that what's the matter with you now?"
He did not answer directly.
"I didn't think it was in you, Queenie, to follow me around and play the spy. I've liked you pretty well—but—I couldn't like this."
She stared at him helplessly, as an animal might have looked.
"I couldn't help it," she murmured, repressing some terrible emotion of despair. "I won't never trouble you no more."
She turned around and went away, walking uncertainly, as if from physical weakness and the blindness of pain.
Van felt himself inordinately wrung—felt it a cruelty not to run and overtake her—give her some measure of comfort. There was nothing he could do that would not be misunderstood. Moreover, he had no adequate idea of what was in her mind—or in her homeless heart. He had known her always as a butterfly; he could not take her tragically now.
"Poor girl," he said as he watched her vanishing from sight, "if only she had ever had a show!"
He looked back at Mrs. Dick's. Bostwick had ousted him after all, before he could extenuate his madness, before he could ascertain whether Beth were angry or not—before he could bid her good-by.
Now that the cool of evening was upon him, along with the chill of sober reflection, he feared for what he had done. He was as mad, as crude as Queenie. Yet his fear of Beth's opinion was a sign that he loved her as a woman should be loved, sacredly, and with a certain awe, although he made no such analysis, and took no credit to himself for the half regrets that persistently haunted his reflections.
It would be a moonlight night, he pondered. He had counted on riding by the lunar glow to the "Laughing Water" claim. Would Beth, by any possibility, attempt to see him—come out, perhaps, in the moonlight—for a word before he should go?
He could not entertain a thought of departing without again beholding her. He wanted to know what she would say, and when he might see her again. After all, what was the hurry to depart? He might as well wait a little longer.
He went to the hay-yard. Dave had disappeared. Half an hour of search failed to bring him to light. On the point of entering a restaurant to allay his sense of emptiness, Van was suddenly accosted by a wild-eyed man, bare-headed and sweating, who ran at him, calling as he came.
"Hey!" he cried. "Van Buren! Come on! Come on! She's dyin' and all she wants is you!"
"What's wrong with you, man?" inquired the horseman, halted by the fellow's words. "What are you talking about?"
"Queenie!" gasped the fellow, panting for his breath. "Took poison—O, Lord! Come on! Come on! She don't want nothing but you!"
Van turned exceedingly pale.
"Poison? What you want is the doctor!"
"He's there—long ago!" answered the informant excitedly, and swabbing perspiration from his face. "She won't touch his dope. It's all over, I guess—only she wants to see you."
"Show me the way, then—show me the way. Where is she?" Van shook the man's shoulder roughly. "Don't stand here trembling. Take me to the place."
The man was in a wretched plight, from fear and the physical suffering induced by what he had seen. He reeled drunkenly as he started down the street, then off between some rows of canvas structures, heading for a district hung with red.
At the edge of this place, at an isolated cabin, comprising two small, rough rooms, the man seemed threatened with collapse.
"May be too late," he whispered hoarsely, as he listened and heard no sounds from the house. "I'm goin' to stay outside—and wait."
The door was ajar. Without waiting for anything further, Van pushed it open and entered.
"There he is—I knew it!" cried Queenie from the room at the rear. It was a cry that smote Van like a stab.
Then he came to the room where she was lying.
"I knew you'd come—I knew it, Van!" said the girl in a sudden outburst of sobbing, and she tried to rise upon her pillow. Agony, which she had fought down wildly, seized her in a spasm. She doubled on the bed.
Van glanced about quickly. The doctor—a young, inexperienced man—was there, sweating, a look of abject helplessness upon his face. The room was a poor tawdry place, with gaudy decorations and a litter of Queenie's finery. In her effort to conquer the pains that possessed her body, the girl had distorted her face almost past recognition.
Van came to the bedside directly, placed his hand on her shoulder, and gave her one of his characteristic little shakings.
"Queenie, what have you done?" he said. "What's going on?"
She tried to smile. It was a terrible effort.
"It's nobody's fault—but what was the use, Van?—what was there in it for me?"
"She won't take anything—the antidote—anything! There isn't a stomach pump in town!" the doctor broke in desperately. "She's got to! It's getting too late! We'll have to force it down! Maybe she'd take it for you." He thrust a goblet into Van's nervous hand. It contained a misty drink.
"For God's sake take this, Queenie," Van implored. "Take it quick!"
She shrank away, attempting with amazing force of will to mask her pain.
"I'd take the stuff—for your sake—when I—wouldn't for God," she faltered, sitting up, despite her bodily anguish. "You don't ask me to—do it for you."
"I do, Queenie—take it for me!" he answered, wrung again as he had been at her smiles, an hour before, but now with heart-piercing poignancy. "Take it for me, if you won't for anyone else."
She received the glass—and deliberately threw it on the floor. The doctor cried out sharply. Queenie shook her head, all the time fighting down her agony, which was fast making inroads to her life. She fell back on her pillow.
"You didn't—ask me—Van 'cause you love me. Nobody—wants me to live. That's all right. Do you s'pose you could kiss me good-by?"
The look on her face was peculiarly childish, as she drove out the lines of anguish in a superhuman effort made for him. And the yearning there brought back again that thought he had voiced before, that night—why couldn't the child have had a chance?
The doctor was feverishly mixing another potent drink.
Van bent down and kissed her, indulgently.
"Force her to take it!" cried the doctor desperately. "Force her to take it!"
"Queenie," Van said, "you've got to take this stuff."
Her hand had found his and clutched it with galvanic strength.
"Don't—make me," she begged, closing her eyes in a species of ecstacy that no man may understand. "I'd rather—not—Van—please. Only about a minute now. Ain't it funny—that love—can burn you—up?" Her grip had tightened on his hand.
The doctor ran to the window, which he found already opened. He ran back in a species of frenzy.
"Make her take it, make her take it! God!" he said. "Not to do anything—not to do a thing!"
Queenie smiled at Van again—terribly. Her fingers felt like iron rods, pressing into his flesh. As if to complete her renunciation she dropped his hand abruptly. She mastered some violent convulsion that left the merest flicker of her life.
"Good-by, Van—good luck," she whispered faintly.
"Queenie!" he said. "Queenie!"
Perhaps she heard. After an ordeal that seemed interminable her face was calm and still, a faint smile frozen on her marble features.
Van waited there a long time. Someway it seemed as if this thing could be undone. The place was terribly still. The doctor sat there as if in response to a duty. He was dumb.
When Van went out, the man on the doorstep staggered in.
The moon was up. It shone obliquely down into all that rock-lined basin, surrounded by the stern, forbidding hills—the ancient, burned-out furnace of gold that man was reheating with his passions. Afar in all directions the lighted tents presented a ghostly unreality, their canvas walls illumined by the candles glowing within. A jargon of dance-hall music floated on the air. Outside it all was the desert silence—the silence of a world long dead.
Van would gladly have mounted his horse and ridden away—far off, no matter where. Goldite, bizarre and tragic—a microcosm of the world that man has fashioned—was a blot of discordant life, he felt, upon an otherwise peaceful world. As a matter of fact it had only begun its evening's story.
He stood in the road, alone, for several minutes, before he felt he could begin to resume the round of his own existence. When he came at length to the main street's blaze of light, a deeply packed throng could be seen in all the thoroughfare, compactly blocked in front of a large saloon.
Culver, the Government representative in the land-office needs, had been found in his office murdered. He had been stabbed. Van's knife, bought for Gettysburg, had been employed—and found there, red with its guilt.
All this Van was presently to discover. He was walking towards the surging mob when a miner he had frequently seen came running up and halted in the light of a window. Then the man began to yell.
"Here he is!" he cried. "Van Buren!"
The mob appeared to break at the cry. Fifty men charged down the street in a species of madness and Van was instantly surrounded.
Mob madness is beyond explanation. Cattle stampeding are no more senseless than men in such a state. Goldite, however, was not only habitually keyed to the highest of tension, but it had recently been excited to the breaking point by several contributing factors. Lawless thefts of one another's claims, ore stealing, high pressure over the coming rush to the Indian reservation, and a certain apprehension engendered by the deeds of those liberated convicts—all these elements had aroused an over-revulsion of feeling towards criminality and a desire to apply some manner of law. And the primal laws are the laws that spring into being at such a time as this—the laws that cry out for an eye for an eye and a swiftness of legal execution.
Into the vortex of Goldite's sudden revulsion Van was swept like a straw. There was no real chance for a hearing. His friends of the morning had lost all sense of loyalty. They were almost as crazed as those whom his recent success had irritated. The story of his row with Culver had spread throughout the confines of the camp. No link in the chain of circumstantial evidence seemed wanting to convict him. A bawling sea of human beings surrounded him with violence and menace.
To escape the over-wrought citizens, the sheriff, assuming charge of Van, dragged him on top of a stack of lumber, piled three feet high before a building. The cry for a rope and a lynching began with a promptness that few would have expected. In normal times it could scarcely have been broached.
Snatching new-made deputies, hit-or-miss from the mob, and summarily demanding their services, the sheriff exerted his utmost powers to stem the tide that was rising. Something akin to a trial began then and there. A big red-faced drummer from Chicago, a man that Van had never seen, became his voluntary advocate, standing between him and the mob.
He had power, that man, both of limb and presence. His voice, also, was mighty. He shoved men about like rubber puppets and shouted his demands for law and order.
Van, having flung off half a dozen citizens, who in the excitement had felt some fanatical necessity for clutching him, faced the human wolves about him in a spirit of angry resentment. The big man from Chicago mowed his way to the pile of lumber and clambered up by the sheriff. The pile raised its occupants only well above the surging pack of faces.
"Stop your howling! Stop your noise!" roared the drummer from his elevation. "Don't you want to give this man a chance?"
"Don't you want to give this man a chance?"[Illustration: "Don't you want to give this man a chance?"]
"Don't you want to give this man a chance?"[Illustration: "Don't you want to give this man a chance?"]
He was heard throughout the street.
"He's got to prove his innocence or hang!" cried someone shrilly. "A murder foul as that!"
Another one bawled: "Where was he then? Make him tell where he was at six o'clock!"
Culver's watch had been shattered and stopped at precisely six o'clock, presumably by his fall against a table in his office, when he suddenly went down, at the hands of his assassin. This fact was in possession of the crowd.
A general shout for Van to explain where he was at the vital moment arose from all the crowd. The drummer turned to Van.
"There you are," he said. "There's your chance. If you wasn't around the surveyor's shack, you ought to be able to prove it."
Van could have proved his alibi at once, by sending around to Queenie's residence. He was nettled into a stubbornness of mind and righteous anger by all this senseless accusation. He did not realize his danger—the blackness of the case against him. That a lynching was possible he could scarcely have been made to believe. Nevertheless, as the Queenie matter was one of no secrecy and the facts must soon be known, he was turning to the drummer to make his reply when his eye was caught by a face, far out in the mass of human forms.
It was Beth that he saw, her cheek intensely white in the light streaming forth from a store. Bostwick was there at her side. Beth had been caught in the press of the throng as they came from the telegraph office.
He realized that at best his story concerning Queenie would be sufficiently black. With Beth in this theater of accusation the story of Queenie must wait.
"It's nobody's business where I was," he said. "This whole affair is absurd!"
Half a dozen of the men who were nearest heard his reply. One of them roared it out lustily. The mob was enraged. The cries for a violent termination to the scene increased in volume. Men were shouting, swearing, and surging back and forth tumultuously, wrought to a frenzy of primal virtue.
One near Beth called repeatedly for a lynching. He had cut a long new piece of rope from a coil at a store of supplies and was trying to drag it through the crowd.
The girl had heard and seen it all. She realized its full significance. She had never in her life felt so horribly oppressed with a sense of terrible things impending. Impetuously she accosted a man who stood at her side.
"Oh, tell them he was with me!" she said.
The man looked her over, and raising himself on his tip toes, shook his hat wildly at the mob.
"Say," he shouted at the top of his might, "here's a girl he was with at six o'clock."
It seemed as if only the men near at hand either heard or paid attention. On the farther side, away from Beth, the shouts for mob law were increasing. She turned to Bostwick hotly.
"Can't you do anything? Tell them he was there with us—down at Mrs. Dick's at six o'clock!"
"He wasn't!" said Searle. "He left there at five forty-five."
The man who had shouted listened to them both.
"Five forty-five?" he repeated. "That makes a difference!"
The drummer had caught the shout from out at the edge.
"Who's that?" he called. "Who's got that alibi?"
"All wrong!—No good!" yelled the man who stood by Beth.
The girl had failed to realize how her statement would sound—in such a place as Goldite. Van had turned sick when it reached him. He was emphatically denying the story. The gist of it went through the mass of maddened beings, only to be so soon impugned by the man who had started it from Beth. The fury, at what was deemed an attempted deception, burst out with accumulated force.
The sheriff had drawn a revolver and was shouting to the mob to keep away.
"This man has got to go to jail!" he yelled. "You've got to act accordin' to the law!"
He ordered his deputies to clear the crowd and make ready for retreat. Three of them endeavored to obey. Their efforts served to aggravate the mob.
Confusion and chaos of judgment seemed rising like a tide. In the very air was a feeling that suddenly something would go, something too far strained to hold, and some terrible deed occur before these people could ask themselves how it had been accomplished.
The fellow with the rope was being boosted forward by half a dozen intoxicated fools. Had the rope been a burning fuse it could scarcely have ignited more dangerous material than did its strands of manilla, in those who could lay their hands upon it.
The drummer was shouting himself raw in the throat—in vain.
Van was courting disaster by the very defiance of his attitude. It seemed as if nothing could save him, when two separate things occurred.
The doctor who had been with Van at Queenie's death arrived in the press, got wind of the crisis, and vehemently protested the truth. Simultaneously, the lumberman, Trimmer, drunk, and enjoying what he deemed a joke, hoarsely confided to some sober men the fact that Cayuse had done the murder.
Even then, when two centers of opposition to the madness of the mob had been created, the menace could not at once be halted.
The man with the rope had approached so near the lumber-pile that the sheriff could all but reach him. A furious battle ensued, and waged around the planks, between the deputies and lynchers. It lasted till fifty active men of the camp, aroused to a sense of reaction by the facts that were now becoming known, hurled the struggling fighters apart and dragged them off, all the while spreading the news they had heard concerning the half-breed Indian.
No less excited when at last they knew that Van was innocent, the great crowd still occupied the street, hailing Trimmer to the lumber-pile and demanding to know how he came by the facts, and where Cayuse had gone.
Trimmer was frightened into soberness—at least into soberness sufficient to protect himself and McCoppet. He said he had seen the Indian coming from Culver's office, with blood upon his hands. The Indian had gone straight westward from the town, to elude pursuit in the mountains.
The fact that Van had been at Queenie's side at her death became town property at once. It came in all promptness to Beth.
With a feeling of sickness pervading all her being, she was glad to have Bostwick take her home.
It was late when at last the street was clear, and Van could finally make his escape from danger and returning friends. Dave by then had found himself; that is, he made his way, thus tardily, to the horseman's side—and the two went at length to their dinner.
At half-past eight, with the moon well up, Dave and Van were ready for departure. Their horses were saddled. One extra animal was packed with needed provisions for the crew on the "Laughing Water" claim. Van had ordered all he could for Queenie's final journey—the camp's best possible funeral, which he could not remain to attend. There was nothing to do but to mount and ride away, but—Beth was down at Mrs. Dick's.
Resistance was useless. Bidding Dave wait with the horses at the yard. Van made his way around through the shadows of the houses, and coming out upon a rocky hill, a little removed from the boarding place, was startled to see Beth abruptly rise before him.
The house had oppressed her—and the moon had called. Bostwick, in alarm concerning possible disaster to the plans he had made with McCoppet, now that Culver was dead, had gone to seek the gambler out and ascertain the status of affairs.
For a moment neither Beth nor Van could speak. The girl, like a startled moon-sprite, wide-eyed and grave, had taken on a mood of beauty such as the man had never seen. She seemed to him strangely fragile, a trifle pale, but wholly exquisite, enchanting.
No signs were on her face, but she had wept—hot, angry tears, within the hour. And here was the cause of them all! She had wished he would come—and feared he would come, as conflicting emotions possessed her. Now that he stood here, with moonlight on half of his face, her thoughts were all unmarshaled.
Van presently spoke.
"I'm a kid, after all. I couldn't go away without—this."
"I wish you had! I wish you had!" she answered, at his smile. "I wish I had never seen you in the world!"
His heart was sore for jesting, but he would not change his way.
"If not in the world, wherewouldyou have wished to see me, then?"
"I never wished to see you at all!" she replied. "Your joke has gone too far. You have utterly mistaken my sense of gratitude."
"Guess not," he said. "I haven't looked for gratitude—nor wanted it, either."
"You had no right!" she continued. "You have said things—done things—you have taken shameful advantage—you have treated me like—I suppose like—that other—that other—— You dared!"
Van's face took on an expression of hardness, to mask the hurt of his heart.
"Who says so?" he demanded quietly. "You know better."
"It's true!" she answered hotly. "You had no right! It was mere brute strength! You cannot deny what you have been—to that miserable woman!" Tears of anger sped from her eyes, and she dashed them hotly away.
Van stepped a little closer.
"Beth," he said, suddenly taking her hand, "none of this is true, and you know it. You're angry with that woman, not with me."
She snatched her hand away.
"You shan't!" she said. "Don't you dare to touch me again. I hate you—hate you for what you have done! You've been a brute probably to her as well as to me!"
"To you? When?" he demanded
"All the time! To-day!—Now!—when you say I'm angry at a—woman who is dead!—a woman who died for you!"
It hit him.
"Poor Queenie," he said, "poor child."
"Yes—poor Queenie!" Her eyes blazed in the moonlight. "To think that you dared to treat me like——"
"Beth!" he interrupted, "I won't permit it. I told you to-day I loved you. That makes things right. You love me, and that makes them sacred. I'd do all I've done over again—allof it—Queenie and the rest! I'm not ashamed, nor sorry for anything I've done. I love you—I say—I love you. That's what I've never done before—and never said I did—and that's what makes things right!"
Beth was confused by what he said—confused in her judgment, her emotions. Weakly she clung to her argument.
"You haven't any right—it isn't true when you say I love you. I don't! I won't! You can't deny that woman died of a broken heart for you!"
"I don't deny anything about her," he said. "I tried to be her friend. God knows she needed friends. She was only a child, a pretty child. I'm sorry. I've always been sorry. She knew I was only a friend."
She felt he was honest. She knew he was wrung—suffering, but not in his conscience. Yet what was she to think? She had heard it all—all of Queenie's story.
"You kissed her," she said, and red flamed up in her cheeks.
"It was all she asked," he answered simply. "She was dying."
"And you're paying for her funeral."
"I said I was her friend."
"Oh, the shamelessness of it!" she exclaimed as before, "—the way it looks! And to think of what you dared to do to me!"
"Yes, I kissed you without your asking," he confessed. "I expect to kiss you a hundred thousand times. I expect to make you my wife—for a love like ours is rare. Whatever else you think you want to say, Beth—now—don't say it—unless it's just good-night."
With a sudden move forward he took her two shoulders in his powerful hands and gave her a rough little shake. Then his palms went swiftly to her face, he kissed her on the lips, and let her go.
"You!—Oh!" she cried, and turning she ran down the slope of the hill as hard as she could travel.
He watched her going in the moonlight. Even her shadow was beautiful, he thought, but all his joy was grave.
She disappeared within the house, without once turning to see what he had done. He could not know that from one of the darkened windows she presently peered forth and watched him depart from the hill. He was not so assured as he had tried to make her think, and soberness dwelt within his breast.
Half an hour later he and old Dave were riding up the mountain in the moonlight. The night from the eminence was glorious, now that the town was left behind. Goldite lay far below in the old dead theatre of past activities, dotting the barren immensity with its softened lights like the little thing it was. How remote it seemed already, with its vices, woes, and joys, its comedy and tragedy, its fevers, strifes, and toil, disturbing nothing of the vast serenity of the planet, ever rolling on its way. How coldly the moon seemed looking on the scene. And yet it had cast a shadow of a girl to set a man aflame.
Meantime Bostwick had been delayed in securing McCoppet's attention. The town was still excited over all that had happened; the saloons were full of men. Culver had been an important person, needful to many of the miners and promoters of mining. His loss was an aggravation, especially as his deputy, Lawrence, was away.
The more completely to allay suspicions that might by any possibility creep around the circle to himself, McCoppet had been the camp's most active figure in organizing a posse, with the sheriff, to go out and capture Cayuse. His reasons for desiring the half-breed's end were naturally strong, nevertheless his active partisanship of law and justice excited no undesirable talk. He was simply an influential citizen engaged in a laudable work.
It was late when at length he and Bostwick could snatch a few minutes to themselves. The gambler's first question then was something of a puzzle to Bostwick.
"Well, have you got that thirty thousand?"
"Got it? Yes, I've got it," Bostwick answered nervously, "but what is the good of it now?"
It was McCoppet's turn to be puzzled.
"Anything gone wrong with Van Buren, or his claim?"
"Good heavens! Isn't it sufficient to have things all gone wrong with Culver? What could be worse than that?"
The gambler flung his cigar away and hung a fresh one on his lip.
"Say, don't you worry on Culver. Don't his deputy take his place?"
"His deputy?"
"Sure, his deputy—Lawrence—a man we can get hands down."
Bostwick stared at him hopefully.
"You don't mean to say this accident—this crime—is fortunate, after all?"
"It's a godsend." McCoppet would have dared any blasphemy.
Bostwick's relief was inordinate.
"Then what is the next thing to do?"
"Wait for Lawrence," said the gambler. Then he suddenly arose. "No, we can't afford the time. He might be a week in coming. You'll have to go get him, to-morrow."
"Where is he, then?"
"Way out South, on a survey. You'd better take that car of yours, with a couple of men I'll send along, and fetch him back mighty pronto. We can't let a deal like this look raw. The sooner he runs that reservation line the better things will appear."
Bostwick, too, had risen.
"Will your men know where to find him?"
"If he's still on the map," said the gambler. "You leave that to me. Better go see about your car to-night. I'll hustle your men and your outfit. See you again if anything turns up important. Meantime, is your money in the bank?"
"It's in the bank."
"Right," said McCoppet. "Good-night."
The following day in Goldite was one of occurrences, all more or less intimately connected with the affairs of Van and Beth.
Bostwick succeeded in making an early start to the southward in his car. McCoppet had provided not only a couple of men as guides to the field where Lawrence was working, but also a tent, provisions, and blankets, should occasion arise for their use.
Beth was informed by her fiancé that word had arrived from her brother, to whom Searle said he meant to go. The business of buying Glenmore's mine, he said, required unexpected dispatch. Perhaps both he and Glen might return by the end of the week.
By that morning's train the body of Culver was shipped away—and the camp began to forget him. The sheriff was after Cayuse.
Early in the afternoon the body of the girl who had never been known in Goldite by any name save that of Queenie, was buried on a hillside, already called into requisition as a final resting place for such as succumbed in the mining-camp, too far from friends, or too far lost, to be carried to the world outside the mountains. Half a dozen women attended the somewhat meager rites. There was one mourner only—the man who had run to summon Van, and who later had waited by the door.
At four o'clock the GolditeNewsappeared upon the streets. It contained much original matter—or so at least it claimed. The account of the murder of Culver, the death of Queenie, and the threatened lynching of Van Buren made a highly sensational story. It was given the prominent place, for the editor was proud to have made it so full in a time that he deemed rather short. On a second page was a tale less tragic.
It was, according to one of its many sub-headings, "A Humorous Outcrop concerning two Maids and a Man." It related, with many gay sallies of "wit," how Van had piloted Mr. J. Searle Bostwick into the hands of the convicts, recently escaped, packed off his charges, Miss Beth Kent and her maid, and brought them to Goldite by way of the Monte Cristo mine, in time to behold the discomfited entrance of the said J. Searle Bostwick in prisoner's attire. Mr. Bostwick was described as having been "on his ear" towards Van Buren ever since.
In the main the account was fairly accurate. Gettysburg, Napoleon, and old Dave had over-talked, during certain liquifying processes. The matter was out beyond repair.
Mrs. Dick was prompt in pouncing on the story, hence Beth was soon presented with a copy. In the natural annoyance she felt when it was read, there was one consolation, at least: Searle was away, to be gone perhaps two or three days. He might not see the article, which would soon be forgotten in the camp.
To culminate the day's events, that evening Elsa ran away. She went with a "gentleman" lodger, taking the slight precaution to be married by the Justice of the Peace.
Beth discovered her loss too late to interfere. She felt herself alone, indeed, with Bostwick away, her brother off in the desert, and Van—she refused to think of Van. Fortunately, Mrs. Dick was more than merely a friend. She was a staunch little warrior, protecting the champion, to anger whom was unhealthy. Despite the landlady's attitude of friendliness, however, Beth felt wretchedly alone. It was a terrible place. She was cooped up all day within the lodging house, since the street full of men was more than she cared to encounter; and with life all about her, and wonderful days spreading one after another across the wide-open land, her liberties were fairly in a cage.
From time to time she thought of the horse, awaiting her order at the hay-yard. She tried to convince herself she would never accept or ride the animal. She was certain she resented everything Van had done. She felt the warmest indignation at herself for breaking into bits of song, for glowing to the tips of her ears, for letting her heart leap wildly in her breast whenever she thought of the horseman.
Two days went by and she chafed under continued restraints. No word had come from Bostwick, none from Glen—and not a sign from the "Laughing Water" claim. From the latter she said to herself she wished no sign. But Searle had no right to leave her thus and neglect her in every respect.
The morning of the third long day Mrs. Dick brought her two thin letters. One had been mailed in Goldite, by a messenger down from the "Laughing Water" claim. It came from Van. He had written the briefest of notes:
"Just to send my love. I want you to wear my nugget."
Folded into the paper was a spray of the wild peach bloom.
Beth tried to think her blushes were those of indignation, which likewise caused the beat of her heart to rise. But her hand fluttered prettily up to her breast, where the nugget was pinned inside her waist. Also his letter must have been hard to understand—she read it seventeen times.
Then she presently turned to the other. It was addressed in typewritten characters, but the writing inside she knew—her brother Glen's.
"Dear Old Sis: Say, what in the dickens are you doing out here in the mines, by all that's holey?—and what's all this story in the GolditeNewsabout one Bronson Van Buren doing the benevolent brigand stunt with you and your maid, and shunting Searle off with the Cons? Why couldn't you let a grubber know you were hiking out here to the desert? Why all this elaborate surprise—this newspaper wireless to your fond and lonesome?
"What's the matter with your writing hand? Is this Van-brigand holding them both? What's the matter with Searle? I wrote him two or three aeons ago, when he might have been of assistance. Now I'm doing my eight hours a day in an effort to sink down to China. I'm on the blink, in a way, but not for long, for this is the land where opportunity walks night and day to thump on your door—and I'll grab her by the draperies yet.
"Butme!—working as a common miner!—though I've got a few days off to go and look at a claim with a friend of mine, so you needn't answer till you hear again.
"If Searle is dead, why don't he say so? I only touched him for a few odd dollars—I only needed a grub-stake—fifty would have done the trick—and he doesn't come through. And nobody writes. I guess it's me for the Prodigal, but when I do get next to the fatted calf I'll get inside and eat my way out by way of his hoofs and horns. Why couldn't you and Searle and the maid come down and have a look at me—working?It's worth it. Come on. Maybe it's easier than writing. Yours for the rights of labor, GLEN."
Astonished by the contents of this communication, Beth read it again, in no little bewilderment, to make sure she had made no mistake. No letter from herself? No word from Searle? No answer to Glen's request for money? And he had only asked for a "few odd dollars?" There must be something wrong. He had sent the most urgent requirement for sixty thousand dollars. And she herself had written, at once. Searle had assured her he had sent him word by special messenger. Starlight was less than a long day's ride away. Glen had already had time to see that account in the paper and write.
She had no suspicions of Bostwick. She had seen Glen's letter and read it for herself. And Searle had responded immediately with an offer to lend her brother thirty thousand dollars. There must be some mistake. Glen might be keeping his news and plans from herself, as men so often will. Searle might even have overlooked the importance of keeping Glen fully posted, intending to go so soon to Starlight. Her own letter might have miscarried.
She tried to fashion explanations—but they would not entirely fit. Searle had been gone three days. He had gone before the GolditeNewswas issued. The paper had arrived at Glen's while the man in his car had failed.
For a moment she sickened with the reflection that Searle might once more have fallen captive to the convicts, still at large—and with all the money! Then she presently assured herself that news so sinister as this would have been very prompt to return.
It was all too much to understand—unless Glen were ill—or out of his reason. His two letters, the one to Searle and this one to herself, were so utterly conflicting. It was not to be solved from such a distance. Moreover, Glen wrote that he was off on a trip, and asked her to wait before replying. It was irritating, all this waiting, alone here in Goldite, but there seemed to be nothing else to do.
The long morning passed, and she fretted. In the afternoon the GolditeNewsbroke its record. It printed an extra—a single sheet, in glaring type, announcing the capture of the convicts. By a bold and daring coup, it said, the entire herd of criminals, all half starved and weakened by privations, had been rounded up and transported back to prison. Unfortunately, the report was slightly inaccurate. Matt Barger, the leader in the prison delivery, and the most desperate man in the lot, had escaped the posse's vigilance. Of this important factor in the welcome story of the posse's work Goldite was ignorant, and doomed to be in ignorance a week.
The news to Beth was a source of great relief. But her troubles in other directions were fated to increase. That evening three men called formally—formally, that is to say, in so far as dressing in their best was concerned and putting on their "company manners." But Beth and courtship were their objects, a fact that developed, somewhat crudely with the smallest possible delay.
One of these persons, Billy Stitts by name, was fairly unobjectionable as a human being, since he was a quaint, slow-witted, bird-like little creature, fully sixty years of age and clearly harmless. The others were as frankly in pursuit of a mate as any two mountain animals.
Beth was frightened, when the purport of their visit flashed upon her. She felt a certain sense of helplessness. Mrs. Dick was too busy to be constantly present; Elsa was gone; the ways of such a place were new and wholly alarming. She felt when she made her escape from the three that her safety was by no means assured. Her room was her only retreat. Except for Mrs. Dick, there was not another woman in the house. She was wholly surrounded by men—a rough, womanless lot whose excitements, passions, and emotions were subjected to changes constantly, as well as to heats, by the life all around them in the mines.
That night was her first of real terror. Every noise in the building, and some in the streets, made her start awake like a hunted doe, with imaginings of the most awful description. She scarcely slept at all.
The following day old Billy Stitts called again, very shortly after breakfast. He proved such an amiable, womanly old chap that he was almost a comfort to the girl. She sent him to the postoffice, for a possible letter from Glen. He went with all the pleasure and alacrity of a faithful dog, apologizing most exuberantly on his return for the fact that no letter had come.
She remained in the house all day. The afternoon brought the two rough suitors of the night before, and two more equally crude. Mrs. Dick, to Beth's intense uneasiness, regarded the matter as one to be expected, and quite in accord with reason and proper regulations. A good-looking girl in camp, with her men-folks all giving her the go-by—and what could you expect? Moreover, as some of these would-be courtiers were husky and in line for fortune's smile, with chances as good as any other man's, she might do worse than let them come, and hear what they had to say. It was no girl's need to be neglected as Searle and Van were patently neglecting Beth.
This was the stage in which Beth at length began to meditate on Spartan remedies. The situation was not to be endured. No word had come from Searle. The world might have swallowed him up. She was sick of him—sick of his ways of neglect. And as for Van——
There was no one to whom she could turn—unless it were Glen. If only she could flee to her brother! She thought about it earnestly. She tried to plan the way.
Her horse was at the hay-yard. Starlight was only one day off in the desert. The convicts were no longer about. If only she could ride there—even alone! An early start—a little urging of the pony—she could fancy the journey accomplished with the utmost ease; then scornful defiance, both of Bostwick and of Van.
But a woman—riding in this lawless land alone! She was utterly disheartened, disillusionized at the thought. It would be no less than madness. And yet, it seemed as if she must presently go. Searle's silence, coupled to conditions here, was absolutely intolerable.
With plans decidedly hazy—nothing but a wild, bright dream really clear—she questioned Billy Stitts concerning the roads. He was familiar with every route in miles, whether roadway, trail, or "course by compass," as he termed trackless cruising in the desert. He gave her directions with the utmost minutae of detail as to every highway to Starlight. He drew her a plan. She was sure that she could almost ride to Starlight in the dark. What branches of the road to shun, which trails to choose, possibly, for gaining time, what places to water a famishing horse—all these and more she learned with feverish interest.
"Now a man would do this," and "a man would do that," said Billy time after time, till a new, fantastic notion came bounding full-fledged into Beth's anxious brain and almost made her laugh with delight. She coulddress as a manand ride as a man and be absolutely safe on the journey! She knew a dozen unusual arts for dying the skin and concealing the hair and making the hands look rough. Make-up in private theatricals, at professional hands, she had learned with exceptional thoroughness.
She would need a suit of kahki, miners' books, a soft, big hat, and flannel shirt. They were all to be had at the store. She could order her horse to be saddled for a man. She could readily dress and escape unseen from the house. In a word, she could do the trick!
The plan possessed her utterly. It sent her blood bounding through her veins. Her face was flushed with excitement. She loved adventure—and this would be something to do!
Nevertheless, despite all her plans, she had no real intention of attempting a scheme so mad. Subconsciously she confessed to herself it was just the merest idle fancy, not a thing to be actually ventured, or even entertained.
That night, when she was more beset, more worried than before, however, desperation was increasing upon her. The plan she had made no longer seemed the mere caprice of one in pursuit of pleasure—it appeared to be the only possible respite from conditions no longer to be borne.
When the morning came, after a night of mental torture and bodily fear, her patience had been strained to the point of breaking, and resolve was steeling her courage.
The word that should have come from Searle was still delinquent. But old Billy Stitts brought her a letter from Glen.